The “Million Worker March”
and the Need for a Class Struggle Left Wing in the Unions

by Tom Barrett

Though no one ever expected a
turnout of a million people at the “Million Worker March” in Washington on October 17, 2004, the actual attendance was
well below nearly everyone’s expectations. No more than 10,000 attended, by the
most generous estimates, and a high percentage of them were committed
activists. One participant commented to me, “You know it’s a small
demonstration when everyone here knows each other.” The weeks and months to
come will show whether the forces which organized the event will continue to
plan additional action to advance a radical labor agenda or will become
demoralized and cease to struggle
against the class-collaborationist leadership of the AFL-CIO, headed by John
Sweeney—a body of conservative union officials who continue in the tradition of
Samuel Gompers and George Meany. It is to be hoped, however, that the
labor militants who put so much energy and hard work into making the demonstration
a reality will recognize that they are engaged in a long-termbattle for
the heart and soul of the U.S. working class, a battle which can be won, though not easily. And a broader
class struggle left wing will be needed, going beyond the network of African
American trade union officials and a small group of allies among radicals in
the unions that organized and led the “Million Worker March.”

The
Million Worker March’s attendance was lower than expected.

The current leadership of the U.S.
trade unions, based in an administrative bureaucracy rather than in the
workplaces where actual production is done, has shown that it is capable of
great foresight and creativity when it comes to defending its power against any
challenge from within. What working people need is a leadership that is capable
of great foresight and creativity when it comes to defending the interests of
working men and women against the bosses’ campaign to reduce their living
standards. The unions’ rank-and-file members know that their jobs and living
standards are being eroded. They also know that their unions are not holding
their own against the employers. They know that their elected officials are not
doing a good job. They will follow an alternative leadership, but not until
that leadership earns their trust and shows in action that it has a better
strategy and a stronger backbone than those who hold union office today. In the
meantime, we all have families to support. American workers always find a way,
and in the absence of a collective solution, we look for an individual
solution. It may be a new job with a higher pay scale; it may be overtime hours
on the current job; it may be an additional job, and it may be migrating
to a part of the country where the cost of living is lower relative to
prevailing wages or where the local economy is able to employ more people. The
labor official has the luxury of telling his or her members, “I can’t do any
better for you.” Workers don’t have the luxury of telling that to their kids.
When the officials say, “we can’t,” our response is, “well, we have to.” And
all too often today, when a union organizer attempts to sign up young workers,
they respond with a resounding “why?”

The organizers of the “Million
Worker March” projected demands that
rightly challenged this state of affairs. They are facing an incumbent
officialdom which is more interested in its own power and privileges than the
living standards of its working membership. They are facing a working class
which is distrustful of anyone asking for their vote, whether for union office
or governmental office. And they are facing an employing class which has become
increasingly emboldened as the union movement and their supposed “friends” in
government roll over and play dead as jobs are outsourced, benefits are
slashed, and wages either held steady or reduced outright. So no one should be
surprised that mobilizing a million workers, or anything close to that, was
beyond possibility at this time.

One can make a case that it was
tactically inadvisable to call for a mass demonstration at this time and facing
the opposition of the AFL-CIO and the indifference of progressive formations
within the labor movement. However, first it must be stated unequivocally that
Clarence Thomas of ILWU Local 10 and the other organizers of the Million Worker
March acted in the interests of the working class as a whole and had no other
agenda. Their intent was to carry out mass action in the streets in response to
the marked step-up of attacks against workers’ living standards. They attempted
to bring together diverse forces from the labor, antiwar, African-American,
Latino, and feminist movements in unity against the employers’ offensive. The
Million Worker March achieved a measure of success in bringing together a broad
coalition of organizations and leaderships. Most of these leaderships gave only
a paper endorsement and a platform speaker, and did not turn out their members
in significant numbers. Of course, that is not enough. But it is a start.

The challenge facing the
organizers of the Million Worker March and anyone looking to make fundamental
change in the interests of the working class is to take the existing discontent
among working people and organize it. To be sure, this challenge is
nothing new: in the 1930s Leon Trotsky proposed organizing a class-struggle
left wing in the union movement, to challenge the class-collaborationist
leadership which dominated it, then as now. In the decades since then, many
well-meaning people have tried a variety of strategies for doing that. None of
them, up to now, has been effective.

The
Million Worker March attracted larger participation from African-American
and Latino/Latina workers than most recent protest demonstrations.

The Million Worker March
coalition has potential that previous attempts have lacked: whatever
affiliations some of the organizers have with left-wing political groups,
fundamentally they are coming from within the labor movement, and from a
section of the labor movement which has the most reason to be involved in a
class-struggle left wing, that is African-American workers. The Million Worker
March drew its inspiration, of course, from the Million Man March of 1995, the
most important action of the Black struggle in decades. The Million Worker
March, though relatively small, attracted a higher proportion of African American
and Latino/Latina workers than most protest demonstrations of the recent
past. It attracted the support of a number of leaders from the civil-rights
movement: Martin Luther King, III, was one of the speakers at the event, as was
comedian Dick Gregory. Many speakers noted that the rally’s location, the
Lincoln Memorial, was the site of the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr.,
delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

While most of the Million Worker
March coalition leaders are supporting John Kerry’s candidacy for president of
the United States,
the Million Worker March was in no way a Democratic Party campaign rally.
Though most of the speakers’ anger was directed at the Bush administration, as
it should be, the Democrats came in for plenty of criticism, as they as well
deserve. The Nader-Camejo campaign had a strong and visible presence at the
Million Worker March, and there was no attempt whatsoever to exclude them. If
any speaker suggested that Nader would help Bush be reelected, I did not hear
it. The closest thing I heard to a criticism of Nader came from Dick Gregory,
who was the clearest in his support for Kerry.

The AFL-CIO officialdom’s
opposition to the Million Worker March was motivated by their desire not to create
any backlash or divert energy and attention away from the campaign to elect
John Kerry. It has been a problem for all movements for social change over the
decades during election periods; fortunately, it is less so this year than in
years past. The Million Worker March organizers rejected John Sweeney’s
conservatism and went ahead, even though other more radically inclined labor formations, such as U.S. Labor Against
the War and the Labor Party declined to endorse the demonstration.These two organizations did, in the end, express support for the goals of
the march, but did not officially endorse or help build it. Even though
these two organizations did not officially endorse the Million Worker March,
many of their local groups and leaders worked hard to build it. For example,
Carol Gay of New Jersey Labor Against the War sent out notices urging antiwar
workers to participate and directing them to the buses leaving from different
locations in New Jersey
to bring workers to the Lincoln Memorial demonstration site.

The
Nader-Camejo campaign had a strong and visible presence at the Million
Worker March, and there was no attempt whatsoever to exclude them.

What will determine whether or
not the Million Worker March was a waste of time, energy, and money will be the
work that will be done to follow up on the organizing work that went into it.
The organizers initially proposed a conference for December 3–4 of this year to
plan future activity. There has been little information about it since then,
however, and there is no reference to it on the Million Worker March website.
The “organizing tents” at the rally were little more than covered literature
tables for the different groups which wished to promote themselves and their
activities: not a bad idea in itself, but hardly a framework for ongoing
activity. If the forces which built the Million Worker March can come together
in an ongoing organization, or if an existing organization, such as the Labor
Party, can provide the framework for continuing the work begun with this
demonstration, that would be a great step toward organizing the class-struggle
left wing in the labor movement which is so vital for the working class’s
future.

The Million Worker March
deserved more support than it received, and it should have been bigger. The
organizers did not do everything perfectly, but the blame for the
demonstration’s disappointing turnout rests squarely with John Sweeney and the
AFL-CIO top leadership. The challenge facing all of us in the labor movement is
to win the confidence and trust of the millions of workers whose living
standards are being hammered today to a leadership which is ready to rely on
the strength of those very millions of workers and not depend on politicians’
promises.